Nikolai Ivanovich Kareev, the Russian historian and philosopher, was educated at Moscow University, where he took his doctorate in history (1884). During the late 1870s and early 1880s he spent several years studying abroad. Kareev taught modern European history, first at Warsaw University and then at St. Petersburg University. He became a corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1910 and an honorary member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1929. His main historical studies were devoted to eighteenth-century France, especially the Revolution of 1789.

Although a moderate in politics, Kareev was deeply influenced by such radical Russian thinkers as Aleksandr Herzen, Dimitrii Pisarev, Pëtr Lavrov, and N. K. Mikhailovskii. Like Lavrov and Mikhailovskii, Kareev was a "semipositivist," but he was less influenced by either G. W. F. Hegel or Karl Marx than Lavrov had been. His views of history echo...